Creativity Development – 3 Simple Craft Activities
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Introduction
How to support a child creativity development? In this article we will focus on Creativity Development Activities. If you ask me how I understand a creativity my answer is as follows. This is a way of doing things through “out-of-the-box” thinking. Doing things differently than the most obvious path. This is about finding solutions where it seems there is no solution. Creativity does not mean using a guitar as a hammer. Creativity is about using a guitar to compose wonderful masterpiece from scratch.
To welcome Autumn, we have performed three beautiful craft activities. The Autumn puzzles, Glitter Leaf composition and Colorful Necklace and Bracelets. Under each corresponding activity we explain aim of the exercise and preparations.
Plastic Straw Bracelet and Necklace
The aim
The main aim of the presented activity is to develop a child’s fine motor skills, cognitive senses and focus on creativity development.We are developing creativity, hand-eye coordination. Additionally, we are teaching our children the basics of craft activities.
Preparations
Collect plastic straws
Collect a bunch of plastic color straws. Please do it together with your child. Let your child choose colors and combinations he prefers. Have a wonderful time.
Prepare a candle
Take a simple candle. The best is the flat one used for heating the food dishes. Light the candle.
Start cutting off the straw
This part of the process is crucial. It needs to be done carefully and gently. Make sure that your child does not wear flammable clothes near his palms. He has tied hair. So, coming back to our cutting. Put the plastic straw close enough upon the candle so the heat starts to melt the plastic. Once it is melted a little bit, cut off a small part. Repeat until you have a desirable amount of them. DO NOT burn the plastic and DO NOT TOUCH it right after cutting it. Let it cool down. The hot plastic can really burn your skin. Besides that once touched and moved it sticks to everything. The best way to see how to do it is to see the movie attached in this article.
Make a necklace or bracelet
Use twine to slip the plastic parts into it. Adjust the size and have fun 🙂
Autumn puzzles
The aim
The main aim of the presented activity – autumn puzzles – is to develop a child’s memory and cognitive senses. It depends on child’s creativity what the puzzles theme will be. The child’s brain develops quickly during the first five years. After that time, the ability to gather so much information decreases significantly. Just enough to say that the number of new neurons connections made between 0-5 years is as high as many neurons connection made between 5-70 years! Unbelievable fact, but taking this under consideration, it is clear that the more our child gets during early childhood, the better.
Preparations
Collect leaves
Go outside and collect leaves. Please do it together with your child. It is an excellent opportunity to talk about seasons, why leaves fall, why do they change colors. Next, what happens to these leaves if not collected and is it good or bad for the trees to lost leaves. Have a wonderful time. The answers to the above question you will find at the end of our article.
Prepare the puzzle pad
The blank puzzle pad, you can either do it yourself or buy it. We bought it.
Draw the outline of a leaf
Let the child outline a leaf. To do that, the child needs to use both hands – one to hold the leaf on the pad, the other one to outline. You can help younger kids; however, we encourage you to assist them in the last moment – this should be their work during which they learn their skills and limits.
Color the pattern
Once you have an outlined leaf, let the child color it. Use crayons, paint, or whatever your child likes and feels comfortable. Later on, you can encourage him/her to use different drawing techniques. The more colorful the leaf is, the better.
Dry the painting and separate the puzzles
Make sure that the painting is dry. Explain to your child to memorize the pattern and once ready separate the puzzles. After that, ask him/her to arrange the puzzles. Satisfaction guaranteed!
Autumn Glitter Leaf
The aim
The main aim of the presented activity – glitter leaf – is to develop child’s cognitive senses and empower creativity development.
Preparations
Collect leaves
Similar to the Autumn Puzzles, we need leaves to perform this activity. Therefore going outside is a must 🙂 During your walk, your kid might have a lot of questions. For some of them, we prepared answers at the end of our article.
Prepare the leaf
The leaf should be big enough, so it is comfortable for your child to operate on it. Make sure the leaf is not wet and flat.
Glue it and glitter it
Use glue on the leaf’s surface. Later on use glitter all around. The imagination is the limit. Have fun!
Autumn questions and answers
When the plant lose chlorophyll they cannot produce food in the process called photosynthesis. To survive, the tree reduces the amount of water transported to the leaves. The connection between the leaf and the tree closes and dries. The rest is history.
Naturally, to survive the winter. The whole leaves surface on the tree is enormous. It helps to collect energy from the Sun, but on the other hand, it makes the massive amount of water evaporates from the tree. During the summertime, when the temperature is high, it’s often raining, this is not an issue. During the winter, the situation changes – the more water the tree keeps inside, the better. If water is outside and the temperature drops below the freezing point, then it has catastrophic consequences for the plant. Its’ cells are broken, and they die. That is why farmers around the world are so worried if after blooming, the ground frost comes.
Countless. According to Northwestern University psychology professor Paul Reber, our brains have the capacity to store up to 2.5 petabytes of data. That’s the equivalent of three million hours of TV shows—or about the same storage as nearly 4,000 256GB iPhones (the largest size available).
At just 10 years old, Nischal Narayanam claimed his first Guinness World Record—for most random objects memorized. (In case you want to beat it, he memorized 225 random objects in a little over 12 minutes.) A few years later, he also won the title of most digits memorized in one minute—he memorized 132—and National Geographic has him listed as one of the “seven brilliant brains of the world.”
Left-handed people make up just 10 percent of the population, but this small portion of people—and those who are related to them—have a better chance of remembering the information they take in compared to their right-handed counterparts. Evidently, lefties and their relatives have larger corpus callosums, which link the brain’s hemispheres and make memories clearer in the mind.
Well, taking a power nap after a long bout of studying isn’t procrastinating—in fact, it’s quite the opposite. When German scientists asked two groups of subjects to memorize sets of cards, they found that the group who took a 40-minute nap remembered 85 percent of the cards, while the group who stayed awake remembered just 60 percent of them.
This is a way of doing things through “out-of-the-box” thinking. Doing things differently than most obvious path. This is about finding solutions where it seems the solution does not exists. Creativity does not mean using a guitar as a hammer. Creativity is about using a guitar to compose wonderful masterpiece from scratch.
Last but not least, remember that creativity development is about having fun together. The environment should be free from stress. Your child should enjoy the play, should have time, so his mind blooms
If you liked this article, you might be interested in our post about fine motor skills development. Also, please leave the comment below. We are curious what are your opinions about the importance of fine motor skills.
